According to Ars Technica, a power outage at a US data center on Sunday, October 27th, caused significant service disruptions for TikTok and other apps operated by the newly formed TikTok USDS Joint Venture. The company acknowledged the outage on Monday morning, stating they were working to restore services after problems began early Sunday. DownDetector reports showed the majority of issues were resolved by early Monday, but users continued experiencing login problems, video upload delays, and buggy For You pages. The glitches occurred during the app’s very first weekend under the control of its new US owners, a group hand-picked by Donald Trump. This timing immediately sparked conspiracy theories on social media that the app was already censoring left-leaning content. Concurrently, Wired reported that TikTok is now asking US users to agree to a new privacy policy that allows the collection of precise GPS location data and AI interaction metadata.
A power outage with perfect political timing
Here’s the thing about infrastructure failures: they’re never just technical. When they happen at a politically charged moment, they become a story about trust. And this was about as charged as it gets. The app goes glitchy on its first weekend under new, controversial ownership? Of course the internet lost its mind. People weren’t just complaining about videos not loading; they were genuinely asking if this was the beginning of a MAGA-fied algorithm purge. TikTok’s silence for over a day didn’t help. It created a vacuum, and conspiracy theories rushed in to fill it. It’s a brutal lesson for the new owners: in this climate, every server hiccup is a political event.
The real story is the data grab and the algorithm shift
But honestly, the weekend glitches are a temporary headache. The much bigger, permanent shift is in that new privacy policy. Before, TikTok didn’t take your precise GPS location in the US. Now it can. It’s also explicitly asking to hoover up all your AI interaction data. That’s a massive expansion of its data collection footprint. Why? Well, The Information reported back in July that building a new, US-controlled version of the app and retraining its infamous algorithm would be a complex, messy process likely to cause “technical issues.” This data is the fuel for that new engine. They need US user data to build a US-owned algorithm. So the instability might just be starting.
Who wins and loses in this messy transition?
So who benefits from a buggy, increasingly data-hungry TikTok? Its competitors, for one. Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts must be watching this saga with popcorn. Every outage report on DownDetector is a potential user giving up and opening a rival app. The real loser, though, is user trust. The blend of technical instability and aggressive new data policies creates a sense of uncertainty. Is the app breaking, or is it being… *reformed*? When Trump says he wants it “100 percent MAGA,” what does that mean for the content you actually see? For businesses and creators who rely on the platform, this isn’t just gossip—it’s a threat to their livelihood. They’re building on what feels like shifting sand. And if the core recommendation engine gets retrained with a different political or cultural bias, the entire ecosystem could change overnight.
